Very few businesses are run entirely from the office. Whether it is sales calls and meetings, installation, support or deliveries, there will always be times when key people and equipment are out on the road. Keeping track of them may seem like a convenience but it can be a money saver, too - providing you don't have to spend a lot on equipment and infrastructure to do it.
Installing GPS (global positioning satellite) receivers in vehicles is pricey - from £500 to £1,000, plus monthly service charges - and does not tell you what's happening to the driver when a van is in a car park all day. There are cheaper radio-based solutions, but you don't need to buy any new equipment if you use one of the new services that tracks people down via their mobile phone.
The principle behind it is this: your mobile phone knows where it is. It has to know so that it can communicate with the network. Reporting your location back to other people (passive location) or giving you information about nearby services (active location) isn't particularly hard. All four UK mobile networks are now offering location services and APIs (applications programming interfaces) for working with them, but it has taken years to get to this point.
Some of the delays date back to a 1994 decision by the US federal communications commission to make mobile phone operators supply the location of callers to emergency services to within 50 metres by the end of 2005. This is the Extended 911 (E911) service. Rather than seeing location services as a commercial opportunity, the networks argued about who would foot the bill. Despite the delays, E911 helped drive development of middleware systems that have made it much simpler for mobile operators and developers to work with location information.
Phase one of the equivalent European regulation, E112, came into force last week and it is far less prescriptive. It doesn't force network operators to develop location services or specify the precision, but if they have the information, they have to make it available to emergency services. John Clark, of location specialist TCS, suspects that the EU was keen to avoid the arguments that mired developments in the US. But he also points out that operators in the UK and Europe are far more interested in the commercial opportunities for selling location information.
Mobile phones are far cheaper than GPS, and are not limited to a vehicle. If you want a dedicated unit for each vehicle, clip-on solar-powered GSM modules cost around £70 from companies such as Actineon, and prices should halve by next year. There are still running costs. Receiving a location costs around 5-6p, although some services charge as much as 30p per inquiry. Still, the price drops if you buy in bulk, and providers are moving towards fixed monthly fees. For example, Vodafone already offers a fixed minimum fee of £500 for up to 50,000 requests.
However, mobile phones are not as accurate. GPS can pinpoint you to within five or 10 metres by triangulating signals from satellites, whereas your phone just reports the ID of the cell it is in. The location gateway supplies the latitude and longitude and size of the cell, so you get a position and an idea of how precise that position is. Information about signal strength and direction narrow it down, and in GSM 1800 networks - Orange and T-Mobile - the cells cover smaller areas. But in the end, you get a location covering at best 100-500m in a town centre, rising to 1km in suburbs, 5km out of town, and up to 10km or 20km in the rural areas.
You can use data from mapping systems to tie the location to the nearest known road, and if your system lets users request directions, customer details or other useful information, you can use their request to narrow down their location even further. In practice, this is good enough for most business applications, such as estimating a delivery time or finding out which service engineer is closest to a customer. Anne Jones, from Vodafone, suggests the margin of error may even be a good thing, helping us get used to location services without creating a backlash of fears about Big Brother bosses spying on the workforce.
Tracking a delivery van lets you schedule trips efficiently or give customers accurate delivery times without interrupting drivers to ask where they are. Location information also lets you check if a driver is dawdling, speeding or running personal errands, which can cause friction. Privacy isn't a question of whether you have something to hide, much as your boss might like to know that you're actually at a job interview when you phone in sick. There are concerns about stalking, discrimination and sheer invasion of privacy, and if workers feel the system is spying on them, you're likely to see productivity fall rather than rise.
The mobile operators are working on a code of conduct to protect privacy. With consumer services such as Carphone Warehouse's mapAmobile, you get a notification that someone is looking for you and you can decide whether or not to reveal your location. That's not convenient for a fleet-tracking system where the driver is busy driving, and most systems allow you to collect signed permissions to get location information for employees during set working hours.
The networks don't store or manage any permissions for who can access your location. This is handled by the applications that access the location information. The location is usually supplied as an XML web service, and if you want to build location information into an existing line of business application, you can combine it with a mapping service such as MapInfo or Microsoft's MapPoint. Unlike older, proprietary geographical information systems, these offer mapping and routing information in standard formats, again as XML web services, so you don't need to be a mapping expert to work with them.
Instead of dealing with multiple mobile networks yourself, you can work with an aggregator such as Mobile Commerce to get location information from all of them through a single API. Alternatively, you can buy in a fleet tracking application that includes location tracking. For smaller companies, there are services such as Easyreach, FollowUs and Fonetrack, which users can access via a password-protected web page.
Fonetrack is also available via a Wap phone or Java on mobile devices, as a voice call, and as a web service. The low initial cost of mapAmobile (£24.99 to track one mobile number for a year plus 30p per inquiry) is attracting enough interest from smaller companies to prompt Carphone Warehouse to develop a commercial service as well.
Combining GPS and GSM gives the best of both worlds. So-called assisted GPS phones (AGPS) will start up more quickly and use far less power than traditional GPS units because the network can tell them where to find the GPS satellites. 3 hopes to introduce AGPS phones within six months and other mobile services should have them next year.
It is also possible to get more precise locations for GSM phones by triangulating the signal from the phone more precisely, but the operators are reluctant to spend the money until they see a demand - and a profit.
Useful links
Easyreach
www.easyreach.co.uk
Fonetrack
www.justfone.com/corp
FollowUs
www.followus.co.uk
MapAmobile
www.mapamobile.com
Mobile Commerce
www.mobilecommerce.co.uk
MapInfo
www.mapinfo.co.uk
MapPoint
www.microsoft.com/mappoint/net
Ordnance Survey
www.ordsvy.gov.uk/business/site.cfm
